I-Med
by Steve SaintI could see the young woman who had just delivered her first baby, a beautiful little olive skinned boy, was dying. Her placenta would not deliver and she had been sitting in her hammock bleeding for more than a day. Her young husband as well as almost the entire village watched helplessly as her life slowly slipped away.
I felt worse than helpless. When I landed at the little jungle airstrip the people in Quhueidiono thought that it meant help had arrived. As they looked on expectantly to see what miraculous remedy I would produce I despaired. I had no miraculous remedy. All I had to offer was a vague memory of answers a visiting woman doctor had given to women of this same tribe who had asked about child birth problems they frequently faced. I had been the interpreter.
The situation I found myself in was not unusual at all, even at the beginning of the twenty first century. In fact, access to professional medical attention for problems in child birth, contagious diseases, HIV aids, malaria, and epidemics such as Cholera is a luxury that a majority of the people living in frontier areas of our planet do not yet have.
When the drama in Quehueidiono had played itself out, I found that this one life threatening situation had radically changed my attitude toward the practice of medicine where there is no doctor. I will tell you about my change in attitude, but first I better tell you how the drama in Quehueidiono ended.
The atmosphere in the little thatched hut was somber and tense. Not only could we feel death approaching, but we could smell it. In the hot humid tropics the remains of the severed umbilical chord tied to the torn placenta was already beginning to decompose. There was a hospital just seventy miles away but the beautiful young woman would not have survived being carried five miles on rugged jungle trails let alone seventy. By air it was just a thirty five minute flight and a short car ride to professional help. But the sun was setting and there is no flying in the Ecuadorian jungle after dark. There was no way to fly this young mother in desperate situation to the hospital. And, it was clear that without medical help she would not live to see another day.
Desperately trying to recall the doctor’s answer I had translated when the Waodani women asked how to stop bleeding during and after child birth, I fearfully began trying to follow the doctor’s advice. The doctor had said, “Most bleeding during and immediately after child birth will probably be caused by a torn or semi-detached placenta.” I remembered how difficult it was to try to translate that idea to a group of tribal women.
The gynecologist had said something about doing abdominal massage and getting the baby to begin breast feeding to stimulate contractions to dispel the placenta. I got a couple of women in the hut to help me and we began to do what the doctor had suggested. I desperately wished I had known I would have to put her suggestions into practice one day.
Miracle of miracles, it worked. The placenta delivered along with a pool of blood that had accumulated in this now almost unconscious mother’s uterus.
That young woman and her precious baby lived. Her extended family celebrated and the entire village was visibly relieved. The experience for me was both unnerving and exhilarating. I began to wonder how much better I could face situations like this with even a little bit of structured training. And I began to understand how powerful the relationship and credibility is between a caregiver and the hurting people who receive their care.
The young couple in Quehueidiono gave their little baby my tribal name, Babae. That gave me standing in their community and an open door to visit and interact with them on a deep and personal level.
As I told Ginny about the dramatic events in Quehueidiono I began to understand in a new way why the practice of medicine has been such a common and critical part of missionary efforts in frontier areas. As I went on to treat snake bites and malaria, learned to suture wounds and treat other recurring problems regularly faced by the Waodani people we were living with in the Ecuadorian Amazon, I also began to understand why Jesus spent so much of his ministry tending to the physical as well as the spiritual needs of the hurting people who came to him for help.
Jesus understood much more clearly than our superficial knowledge will allow us to realize, that spiritual needs are fundamental while physical needs are superficial. Physical sickness can only shorten life’s ‘opening exercises’ while spiritual disease kills its victims for eternity.
Jesus took time from His busy schedule as time for his short ministry here on Earth ran out to make the lame walk and give sight to the blind. He healed a withered arm and stopped a woman’s bleeding. He gave life back to a father’s daughter and raised a friend from the dead. He even took pity on people who were hungry and multiplied a few fish and loaves of bread to feed them.
Jesus’ command to us, His followers, is that we teach our disciples what He taught His disciples (Mt. 28:20). Paul told us to strive to be “…servants of Christ and Stewards of His mysteries.” (I Co. 4:1) And then, very dramatically Jesus personally said that when we care for the physical and emotional needs of “the least of these” people who need outside intervention, we are doing it for Him personally.
If we are going to be like Jesus we have to concern ourselves with what hurts people – physical, emotional and spiritual!
Before this letter gets too long, let me answer some of the questions that may have occurred to you regarding the idea of developing a training program to teach indigenous people in frontier areas to care for the health-care needs of their own people.
Why spend time and limited resources helping people with temporal physical ailments instead of helping them with spiritual problems?
Good question. I think the answer is partly that this is the surest way to develop a relationship with people who are suspicious or openly unwilling to listen to the Gospel message Christ has told us to share with everyone everywhere. If we first show concern for their ‘felt’ needs we frequently get an opportunity to offer help for the same people’s more fundamental spiritual problems. Offering help for hurting people’s physical needs does not exclude helping them with their spiritual hurts. No, it is in fact the surest way I have seen to open the door to the spiritual needs in their lives.
How can we possibly provide professional medical help for hundreds of millions of people when many of our own citizens don’t even have health insurance?
I don’t think we can. I don’t even think we should – not by ourselves. The reality in our world today is that a small minority of us consume the majority of medicines and health care services. Most of the people in our world today don’t even know that the level of health-care we have even exists. I can tell you from personal experience that just having a pharmacy down the street and money to buy non-prescription drugs for colds, pain and other common ailments gives us more health care than tens of millions of people in other parts of the world have. Having a public health service that offers free inoculations for our children against measles, mumps, chicken pox, polio, diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, and hepatitis ‘B’ makes us elite health care recipients.
If you consider that virtually everyone in our world has access to a professional trained doctor and a huge number of medicines they can prescribe, and most of us have access to incredible technologies wielded by surgeons, radiologists, and many other specialties – the average North American is to medicine in our world what Gill Gates is to money. We have so much we can’t even imagine how little most people have.
We can’t offer that level of health care to the rest of the world but we could develop alternate systems that could meet many common ailments that affect the world’s poorer citizens. And we could also offer spiritual help alongside physical remedies by training indigenous followers of Christ as basic health and spiritual care providers.
Consider just one example – malaria. This terrible disease not too long ago was a scourge here in the United States. Today no one in North America worries about getting malaria here. But this year five hundred million people will suffer the awful fevers, chills and debilitating pains and weakness that comes with malaria attacks. Over one million of those people will die from malaria this year.
Want to know what it takes to cure malaria? In most cases a three day supply of simple pills will cure this terrible disease. The pills are available without prescription for about a dollar per cure. So what is the problem? The biggest problem in curing most cases of malaria is that the distribution system to get the medicine to sufferers has broken down or has never been set up. Another problem, believe it or not, is that for many sufferers, a dollar is more than they can afford. For all these people a little loving help from people who care for them in Jesus name and a little training to avoid future infection would be life changing.
The best solution is not to send doctors and nurses from western countries to try to treat every case of malaria. The best solution is to train local people to treat malaria and to teach them to develop and maintain a simple education and medicine distribution system. These people don’t need a medical degree. Frankly, most people in malarial areas know more about the disease than fully trained medical professionals in areas where there is no malaria.
I felt worse than helpless. When I landed at the little jungle airstrip the people in Quhueidiono thought that it meant help had arrived. As they looked on expectantly to see what miraculous remedy I would produce I despaired. I had no miraculous remedy. All I had to offer was a vague memory of answers a visiting woman doctor had given to women of this same tribe who had asked about child birth problems they frequently faced. I had been the interpreter.
The situation I found myself in was not unusual at all, even at the beginning of the twenty first century. In fact, access to professional medical attention for problems in child birth, contagious diseases, HIV aids, malaria, and epidemics such as Cholera is a luxury that a majority of the people living in frontier areas of our planet do not yet have.
When the drama in Quehueidiono had played itself out, I found that this one life threatening situation had radically changed my attitude toward the practice of medicine where there is no doctor. I will tell you about my change in attitude, but first I better tell you how the drama in Quehueidiono ended.
The atmosphere in the little thatched hut was somber and tense. Not only could we feel death approaching, but we could smell it. In the hot humid tropics the remains of the severed umbilical chord tied to the torn placenta was already beginning to decompose. There was a hospital just seventy miles away but the beautiful young woman would not have survived being carried five miles on rugged jungle trails let alone seventy. By air it was just a thirty five minute flight and a short car ride to professional help. But the sun was setting and there is no flying in the Ecuadorian jungle after dark. There was no way to fly this young mother in desperate situation to the hospital. And, it was clear that without medical help she would not live to see another day.
Desperately trying to recall the doctor’s answer I had translated when the Waodani women asked how to stop bleeding during and after child birth, I fearfully began trying to follow the doctor’s advice. The doctor had said, “Most bleeding during and immediately after child birth will probably be caused by a torn or semi-detached placenta.” I remembered how difficult it was to try to translate that idea to a group of tribal women.
The gynecologist had said something about doing abdominal massage and getting the baby to begin breast feeding to stimulate contractions to dispel the placenta. I got a couple of women in the hut to help me and we began to do what the doctor had suggested. I desperately wished I had known I would have to put her suggestions into practice one day.
Miracle of miracles, it worked. The placenta delivered along with a pool of blood that had accumulated in this now almost unconscious mother’s uterus.
That young woman and her precious baby lived. Her extended family celebrated and the entire village was visibly relieved. The experience for me was both unnerving and exhilarating. I began to wonder how much better I could face situations like this with even a little bit of structured training. And I began to understand how powerful the relationship and credibility is between a caregiver and the hurting people who receive their care.
The young couple in Quehueidiono gave their little baby my tribal name, Babae. That gave me standing in their community and an open door to visit and interact with them on a deep and personal level.
As I told Ginny about the dramatic events in Quehueidiono I began to understand in a new way why the practice of medicine has been such a common and critical part of missionary efforts in frontier areas. As I went on to treat snake bites and malaria, learned to suture wounds and treat other recurring problems regularly faced by the Waodani people we were living with in the Ecuadorian Amazon, I also began to understand why Jesus spent so much of his ministry tending to the physical as well as the spiritual needs of the hurting people who came to him for help.
Jesus understood much more clearly than our superficial knowledge will allow us to realize, that spiritual needs are fundamental while physical needs are superficial. Physical sickness can only shorten life’s ‘opening exercises’ while spiritual disease kills its victims for eternity.
Jesus took time from His busy schedule as time for his short ministry here on Earth ran out to make the lame walk and give sight to the blind. He healed a withered arm and stopped a woman’s bleeding. He gave life back to a father’s daughter and raised a friend from the dead. He even took pity on people who were hungry and multiplied a few fish and loaves of bread to feed them.
Jesus’ command to us, His followers, is that we teach our disciples what He taught His disciples (Mt. 28:20). Paul told us to strive to be “…servants of Christ and Stewards of His mysteries.” (I Co. 4:1) And then, very dramatically Jesus personally said that when we care for the physical and emotional needs of “the least of these” people who need outside intervention, we are doing it for Him personally.
If we are going to be like Jesus we have to concern ourselves with what hurts people – physical, emotional and spiritual!
Before this letter gets too long, let me answer some of the questions that may have occurred to you regarding the idea of developing a training program to teach indigenous people in frontier areas to care for the health-care needs of their own people.
Why spend time and limited resources helping people with temporal physical ailments instead of helping them with spiritual problems?
Good question. I think the answer is partly that this is the surest way to develop a relationship with people who are suspicious or openly unwilling to listen to the Gospel message Christ has told us to share with everyone everywhere. If we first show concern for their ‘felt’ needs we frequently get an opportunity to offer help for the same people’s more fundamental spiritual problems. Offering help for hurting people’s physical needs does not exclude helping them with their spiritual hurts. No, it is in fact the surest way I have seen to open the door to the spiritual needs in their lives.
How can we possibly provide professional medical help for hundreds of millions of people when many of our own citizens don’t even have health insurance?
I don’t think we can. I don’t even think we should – not by ourselves. The reality in our world today is that a small minority of us consume the majority of medicines and health care services. Most of the people in our world today don’t even know that the level of health-care we have even exists. I can tell you from personal experience that just having a pharmacy down the street and money to buy non-prescription drugs for colds, pain and other common ailments gives us more health care than tens of millions of people in other parts of the world have. Having a public health service that offers free inoculations for our children against measles, mumps, chicken pox, polio, diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, and hepatitis ‘B’ makes us elite health care recipients.
If you consider that virtually everyone in our world has access to a professional trained doctor and a huge number of medicines they can prescribe, and most of us have access to incredible technologies wielded by surgeons, radiologists, and many other specialties – the average North American is to medicine in our world what Gill Gates is to money. We have so much we can’t even imagine how little most people have.
We can’t offer that level of health care to the rest of the world but we could develop alternate systems that could meet many common ailments that affect the world’s poorer citizens. And we could also offer spiritual help alongside physical remedies by training indigenous followers of Christ as basic health and spiritual care providers.
Consider just one example – malaria. This terrible disease not too long ago was a scourge here in the United States. Today no one in North America worries about getting malaria here. But this year five hundred million people will suffer the awful fevers, chills and debilitating pains and weakness that comes with malaria attacks. Over one million of those people will die from malaria this year.
Want to know what it takes to cure malaria? In most cases a three day supply of simple pills will cure this terrible disease. The pills are available without prescription for about a dollar per cure. So what is the problem? The biggest problem in curing most cases of malaria is that the distribution system to get the medicine to sufferers has broken down or has never been set up. Another problem, believe it or not, is that for many sufferers, a dollar is more than they can afford. For all these people a little loving help from people who care for them in Jesus name and a little training to avoid future infection would be life changing.
The best solution is not to send doctors and nurses from western countries to try to treat every case of malaria. The best solution is to train local people to treat malaria and to teach them to develop and maintain a simple education and medicine distribution system. These people don’t need a medical degree. Frankly, most people in malarial areas know more about the disease than fully trained medical professionals in areas where there is no malaria.
